What if Robots were Calvinists?

My review of Ken MacLeod's "The Night Sessions."

Five Stars.

Ken MacLeod's The Night Session is not only a good mystery, but it is also intellectually engaging on several levels. It also mercifully treats its "point of departure" - the role of religion in a secularist political system - with more even-handedness than we are used to seeing in this post-Christian, post-modern, post-Dawkins world.

Adam Fergusson is a cop working in Edinburgh sometime after the world was changed in the aftermath of the "Faith Wars." The Faith Wars started on 9/11/01 and concluded sometime later when the Palestine-Israeli conflict was solved on the plains of Megiddo with tanks, artificially intelligent robots and nuclear weapons. In the meantime, the world soured on religion, which was blamed tout court for every suicide bomber and dysfunction in the world. MacLeod references an ugly period of Leftist anti-clerical secularism under the Socialist Nationalists, aka the "Sozis," where the police put "boots into the pews" and rounded up believers and engaged in torture to break the back of whatever latent tendency there might be toward martyrdom might be left after the Faith Wars. In the United States - the place to Europeans where the really scary Christians live - the culmination of the Faith Wars, or Oil Wars as they were known in the United States resulted in the Second Civil War where really scary Christians, such as the Dominionists, who Europeans must believe are real issue, fought back with nuclear weapons, leaving Los Angeles a glassy plain and forcing the emigration of fundamentalists to New Zealand.

The United States is mostly off-stage in this book. The real action happens in Edinburgh, Scotland, with the occasional side-trip to a New Zealand wildlife park run by Creationists. Despite the Faith Wars, it seems that technology has continued to improve. The police are assisted by "Lekis" - Law Enforcement Kinetic Intelligences" - former military artificial intelligences who have moved into new body forms. Some artificially intelligent human-form robots have associated into a leper colony because of their knowledge that their appearance "creeps" out most people. Everyone has very sophisticated "Ithinks" and glasses which seems to give them an on-line presence and/or information connection at all times.

Fergusson's immediate problem is what appears to be a new outbreak of religious or anti-religious violence as first a Catholic priest and then an Episcopal bishop are murdered. Fergusson's investigation draws up deeper and deeper into a world where the principles of secularism and anti-clericalism have been habituated to the extent that the state cannot take official cognizance of religion, and where most people view the small minority of believers as somewhat "off" or anti-social.

One level on which MacLeod's book was intriguing was the basic murder mystery. I judge a book to be a success when it can suck me into it so that I want to see what happens next. I found myself truly interested in following the investigation as it moved from one suspect to another.

Another level on which MacLeod's book engaged my interest was the setting. I found that I don't know much about Edinburgh, so I spent some time "googling," or "ogling" in MacLeod's neologism, about Edinburgh's history, geography and demographics. As part of that, I searched for "Major Weir" - who gets a mention in the book - which led to looking up executions of blasphemers and others. Interesting stuff, albeit it's not in the book, but the setting of a story outside of New York or Los Angeles does add an interesting dimension, particularly where the author is a native and drops in casual references from his personal "data base."

And then, of course, there is MacLeod's plausible future history/society. The seeds of MacLeod's uber-secularist regime already exist in Europe. A lot of Europeans already view public expressions of religion to be something that is just not "done." In the words of Tony Blair's "spin doctor" preventing media inquiry into his boss's religious views, "I'm sorry. We don't do God." Likewise, there is the European sense of superiority based on its notion that more than a few miles from the coast, America is inhabited by unredeemed fundamentalists.

Apart from communicating the notion that religious believers have to keep their heads down in public because of social scorn and derision, and responding to that social contumely by paradoxically acting as if they have nothing to be ashamed of, MacLeod doesn't really show what the Second Enlightenment means to believers or secularized citizens. The "disestablishment of religion" apparently means to MacLeod that certain social issues - abortion, homosexuality or stem-cell research - have been resolved in favor of the secularists. This is a typical misunderstanding of secularists who can't seem to fathom that there are secular arguments in favor of the non-secularist position on these subjects, but let's leave that alone: victors are permitted to write the histories.

By and large, everyone seems quite reasonable and nice. Fergusson was part of the "God Squad" and is experienced with the torture of religious fanatics, but the few times that Fergusson loses his temper and resorts to religious insults he immediately apologizes. For their part, the believers are generally inclined to help the state where they can.

I commend MacLeod for treating religious believers as something more than cartoon characters to be lampooned and treated as being stupid or evil. MacLeod does show why the fear that secularists have concerning the religion insofar as it provides a motive that permits or encourages its adherents to accept martyrdom for their faith. In that regard, it was absolutely brilliant to set the story in blood-drenched Scotland with its history of martyrs and repression. I also thought that even the character of J.R. Campbell rang true to MacLeod's story. Campbell starts out being depicted as a brilliant scientist with more than a touch of "social autism" on account of his adherence to his particular form of literal fundamentalism; Campbell's defense of creationism and denial of heliocentrism on the grounds of a scientific skepticism is amusing. Campbell's subsequent apostasy when he is shown that the Bible contains internal contradictions concerning Genesis 11: 31, Genesis 36:31 and Chronicles 1:43 rings false, on the one hand, because it seems that he should have known something about this in his constant reading of the Bible. On the other hand, insofar as it is said that "scratch an atheist and find a fundamentalist," the reverse is also the case. There are many fundamentalists who have had their entire world view overthrown when they find discrepancies in their understanding of the text and the text itself.

A last bit of classic "big think" speculation is MacLeod's theme that artificial intelligence might give rise to true intelligence and free will, and that it may be the robots who end up as the true believers of the future. It seems that, in a way, this book is what Anthony Boucher's "The Quest for Saint Aquin" would have looked like if Boucher had been a Calvinist rather than a Catholic. In Boucher's classic novella, St. Aquin uses reason to determine that even artificial intelligence owe a duty to God, and because of that duty, they owe a duty to humanity. A Calvinist artificial intelligence might very well conclude that God has elected some and condemned others and therefore find that its way to God does not go through humanity.

Update: On further reflection, I wonder if MacLeod's theme isn't really about predestination and how are religious choices are determined by our upbringing. If you've read the book you will remember that the artificial intelligence becomes a Calvinist by "identifying" with a human Calvinist. Is MacLeod saying that a Calvinist background makes a person a Calvinist by default? If that's what MacLeod is saying, then what a delightfully Calvinist subtext to this - admittedly - minor thread in the story.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, let me know.